


Daisy Chain Bonds

by AntivanCrafts



Category: Dragon Age II, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-02-04 17:52:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18609523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntivanCrafts/pseuds/AntivanCrafts
Summary: When Fenris closes his eyes at night, he opens them to a man in green. Laughing and somber by turns, their conversations are full of anything but answers.





	Daisy Chain Bonds

The man in green walked his dreams.

He had always been there, or so it seemed to Fenris —how would he know the difference, or have confidence in that very certainty if he thought he did— a smiling figure cast out of Fenris’s shadow, dark where Fenris was not, falling to drape pale skin, only a few shades off from Fenris’s hair, bent to follow his every movement even when he was standing still, all flashing eyes and long fingers cutting through the air between them. He was slight. He was laughter and he was stillness and he was a thousand years pressed thin, flat and fragile and liable to fracture at a touch. Fenris had seen it, that brittle strength gone sharp, every time they locked gazes. He was crooked, everything about him, his fingers, his boots, his smile, were hard angles and harder to pin down upon waking, slipping away from him like so much water, like a dream, worthless and worth less than the time it took to tell. Until the next time he closed his eyes and opened them to a face framed by empty spaces.

He didn’t always dream of the man, didn’t always see him, but Fenris could always tell when the man was about. His laughter carried easily, loudly. His silences were louder still.

For time beyond count Fenris had fought this unwanted, unasked for intrusion into his sleeping hours. How could he not? What had once been the only true freedom available to him, and now even that was to be taken from him, and by who? A mage? A demon, or something worse, some unnamed crawling horror drawn by magic and the lyrium burned into Fenris’s skin? And so he fought. Launched himself at him with cloawed fingers and, when that failed, words. After that, silence. 

With the endless dripping passage of time he had, not softened, but drawn his wariness closer to his chest with measured carelessness that cost him dearly.

That was when the man started to speak. Nonsense, at first. Words that weren’t. “Gleipnir,” when curling an extended finger to the tattoos blooming sudden heat and light where there had been none, with a tight expression that chased itself across his face, that Fenris would have been called pained had he been inclined to charity —he was not— and the wild baring of teeth he likely thought a smile. Then, after, a laugh that seemed to cut the insides of the man’s mouth in passing because he bled smiles, dripped carelessly worded care. 

“Little wolf he called you,” he said once, apropos of nothing, with that odd curl of a smile that didn’t catch and hold in his eyes, even in the face of Fenris’s answering snarl. “I’d forgotten-” He was always doing that. Cutting himself off, and that was perhaps the most frustrating thing, to be forever trapped sharing space with a nattering excuse of a thing that refused to explain itself on those rare occasions he seemed, all despite himself, to trip over true meaning. Fenris did not realize this without irony.

It was not unlike those first months after getting his tattoos. Walking and talking had come to him as easy as breathing, but social intricacies, all of those unwritten rules that governed every waking moment of his life, that still did, had to be learned all over again. He sometimes caught himself reacting to a particularly unexpected phrase or brushing pass of fingers over his hair with confusion instead of anger, that reflexive tensing of his every muscle, caught himself drawing back to blink slow bewildered questions that he could never bring himself to voice but which were, nonetheless, answered. And, once or twice, he could be brought to give voice to that rasping laugh that seemed dragged up from the bowels of his chest, so much did they shake him, gut him.

Never more than when a long, slender finger caught in a fold of scarlet cloth, tugged, bringing Fenris’s hand up between them. Fenris blinked, nonplussed. In his waking hours, Fenris would have balked, would have fought this intrusion onto his person with a snarl, with an upraised hand that burst into a wash of light that stained the air silver, that hung unnaturally, that pulsed with the harsh drags of his chest like breathing, like a living thing, but. But here in this strange place between waking and true sleep his limbs were leaden, weighed heavy with a strange reluctance that brought him stuttering to a halt before the movement had truly begun, a shivering shift and bunch of the muscles beneath his skin that resembled nothing so much as a wolf discontentedly resettling its fur. He didn’t understand it, a thought that brought with it a grimace, a downward flick of ears and eyes that was at once strange and horrifyingly familiar to the elf, the man, that had lost so much behind those tall, pale walls of his mind. 

Everything about this man screamed that he was missing something, something important, something glaringly obvious, and the shift from slow edged fear back to anger was as natural, as comforting a thing as he had ever known. Anger was safe, familiar waters, and if it brought with it a measure of disgust for the cowardly impulses that prompted him to turn his back to those unknowns, that, too, was known as well as self. 

“This is a physical thing, it should not have followed you into this place and yet here it is, here it always is,” The man said into the silence, plainly choosing to ignore whatever had brought Fenris’s teeth flashing through the thin line of his lips. He gave Fenris’s arm a little shake, jolting the elf’s eyes up to meet his. “Out of everything you’ve- you chose this? Why? Why not something of-” Breath hissed over his teeth. “Of your mother’s? Of your past?”

Whatever strange, tumbling emotion had prompted him to linger in the circle of the man’s hand did not prevent the sudden, bright spark flaring up, that old anger, that old friend. “You know why,” he nearly spat, every word coming hard and not without pain. “You’ve been a more constant companion to me than my own voice here, you’ve seen it. You know why,” he said again, ripping his arm away from a suddenly slackened grip. Despite himself, and entirely against his wishes, he was unable to disguise the crack in his voice that fractured and broke apart upon meeting the air. “Nothing of those days remains to me, physical or no, if they could be said to have ever existed at all, let alone anything from any woman unfortunate enough to have born me.”

Something brittle snapped and shattered apart in the man’s eyes, lost behind the fan of dark lashes spreading a stain across pale skin, ink on dark water, before he could catch more than a glimpse of it. “Of course you wouldn’t remember.” His voice was a soft, lilting thing, steady as the press of slender fingertips to the shadows behind Fenris’s ears. “How strange it must seem to you. A play in half words and harsher things put on by some stranger wearing your face. Your mother was a singular woman.” There was that small, subtle break again, that pause between words the space of an indrawn breath, lost.

Fenris dragged a hand down the length of his face to stall for time. If he’d had the choice, he would have left this conversation, this person behind him long since, but he knew from long experience that any and every path he chose would only lead him back here, to this moment, this man looking back at him with a pain that he had not earned and did not, could not, own. 

“How could you possibly know,” Fenris said without opening his eyes, but the words lacked heat. Even in his sleep, he was tired. Tired of this wild, restless anger that he could be granted a reprieve from, even in dreaming. Tired of this man and his ceaseless driving at him with words, words, words, of the way there was always something, some word, offhandedly tossed aside like a simple thing when it was so much bigger than that, so much greedier, a mouth, a gullet lined with teeth and soundless sounds, stirring nameless things in the dark places in his mind that were shrouded by fog and lined with traps to catch the unwary tread, of the frustrating knowledge that without him, without his every maddening gesture and slow, wriggling thing pretending at communication, he would once again be relegated to the mercy of his dreams. A pathetic gratitude sat heavy on his tongue, choking him with the weight of words he would never say, could never, because they had long been denied him. What would he gain, that would be worth the cost?

“I think of her often.” If Fenris had opened his eyes now, would he have been disappointed or approving of the very lack of expression to those words? “She is… a frequent place for me to rest my head at night’s end.” Another silence. Fenris’s brow furrowed into cresting wrinkles and falling brows that drew the man’s eye as a flower to the sun, hopeless in its attempts to draw closer but unable to deny the stranglehold of need that gripped it tight despite every mounting failure, compelled by hidden joys and stranger sorrows. The silence drew tight, but the man drew breath to speak again, his words losing that fine edge of control to crack and break open upon meeting the air.

Fenris responded with a tight hiss of air drawn between his teeth, envy gone grief gone, yes, anger, always ever anger, staining his cheeks a spreading flush that traveled up his ears and down his heaving chest, that this man, this stranger, this strange, frustrating maddening creature, demon or mage or construct of his own fractured mind, had these memories that had long been denied him, try as he might to claw at the wall drawn up between what he knew and his every question that plagued his sleep. His family, his mother, his name, the meaning behind every freckle, every thoughtless gesture caught only in passing, this man knew them, and knew them intimately, in a way that he likely never would. Fenris had made his peace with this lack, or thought he had, but having his own failures thrown back in his face provoked a reaction shocking in its immediacy. He tried for words but found them quite beyond him, now.

“They call me a thief,” the man said by way of answer to a question that had not been posed to him. “Of time, of lives. And they aren’t wrong.” There was no guilt dogging those words, no pain in the corners of his mouth or the errant cast of hand, palm over fingers to twist, at worst, a distraction. “But no matter how skilled or infamous a thief may become, there is always that first night, that first flush burning your mouth.”

It was, as usual, an answer that answered nothing, worth less than the breath it took to tell. 

Fenris stepped back to shift into the comforting warmth of his armor, ducking his head to level a glare into his crossed arms. It served no purpose elsewhere. The man responded to glares with the same maddening trail of senseless words as he did anything. Engaging him further in the topic was pointless, and would only frustrate him further. “Why are you here?” Fenris asked then, finally, giving voice to a question that had lined his every word but had never in fact voiced. 

“Because I am compelled to,” the man answered him, and held up a hand to forestall the snarl already bubbling between Fenris’s lips. “Because that first theft returns me to you, night after night, whether I will it or no. There have been many since, but this was. Special. Different. Marked only by the losses that came after, that grew to- it was a death. I am not permitted to forget them. Nor,” he said, his gaze moving to something beyond him, Fenris turning only begrudgingly to follow the path of his eyes. There, in the shapeless mass of dreamstuff beyond, hung a sharpened silhouette that made Fenris’s teeth stand ache. “Are you.”

Danarius. 

Fenris was moving before he consciously put thought to action, between one breath in the next he was running, was flying, feet barely touching ground, breath light in his chest for the first time in years because at last, at long last he was here, within reach if his claws and his fists and his teeth, within his reach, within-

“Peace!” The man said sharply, a word that meant as much to him then as dandelion fluff, less, floating high over his head where it had no weight, no meaning other than as something to be brushed through, pushed aside. He have it not a second’s consideration, for it deserved none. “It is but a figment of your mind, Fenri(s),” he said, and there was some strange disconnect then, a moment of pause between the words as they were spoken and what he heard, but Fenris was far too distracted to pay it any mind, his every thought and breath and beat of his heart bent on that strip of skin between beard and collared robe, but try as he might, it grew no closer, he grew no closer. 

It was some minutes before Fenris’s steps slowed, stopped.

“I told you.”

Fenris didn’t turn around. 

“It is but a dream. A bad one, by the looks of it. I have spent time enough here to control them if I so choose, keep them at bay enough to exchange words with you, and I chose.”

“I don’t need your help,” Fenris replied automatically, some snapping spark of that old anger rising to a dry snap in his voice. “Or your pity. Save it for yourself, it is clearly a favored topic.”

“You think I enjoy being here every night?” The man snapped, hand cutting the air. “Dragged from my warm, comfortable bed to watch you stir yourself into a lather over old enemies and older blood?” Something dragged his words out of him until they sank into the air between them like heavy stones pressed to a sheet of fabric, something that pulled his eyes wide, wider, until they rolled white and wild at the edges as a horse’s. “You think I bestir myself on the account of an ungrateful wretch of a pup?” His lips pulled away from his lips at the last, and Fenris thought only of the shadow before him, and not the shape to those words, the curious weight lent them by what he wouldn’t see, couldn’t, because there was nothing to see. Not tonight. Not ever. 

Then why do so, he thought but didn’t say, lips pressed too tight around the raggedy tear of wounded pride and old pain, older absences burned clear through him enough to leave his mouth tasting of ashes, of failure. 

And again, his unvoiced words were answered. “Until you no longer need to ask that question.”

When at last Fenris turned around, the man was gone, faded into moss edged stones that bent, sagging inwards toward each other beneath their own weight, and for a moment he could barely speak for the frustration lancing acid across his tongue, and then the moment was past, the dream fading, as it always did, to but a vague impression of color and sound that would soon, too, be forgotten beneath the pad of bare feet from one room to another, sleeping to waking, until the next night, the next time he cried out a name in his sleep that he didn’t know, had never known, but was yet burned into the spaces between his teeth, his bones, where something old had begun at last to stir.


End file.
